Google has recently released Google Trends. Google Trends compares different search terms’ usage over time. After reading a post on MDLog about Linux distribution trends I became curious about FreeBSD’s numbers in such a comparison.

So I marched over to distrowatch.com and checked out their Top 10 Linux distributions. They are: Ubuntu, Mandriva, SUSE, Fedora, Debian, Knoppix, Mepis, Gentoo, Slackware, Xandros — in that order.

Google Trends shows that FreeBSD is more popular than: Mandriva, Knoppix, Mepis, Slackware and Xandros. While FreeBSD is enjoying good mind share with respect to Linux, it is also behind Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, Debian and Gentoo in the same comparison. So really this article should be entitled, “FreeBSD more Popular than Some Popular Linux Distributions.”

With FreeBSD’s new focus on the desktop, I believe that the mind share for FreeBSD will be going up once again.

If you haven’t tried FreeBSD lately you are doing yourself a disservice. There are many things to like about FreeBSD.